Why the Real Name Is
`Osama bin London'

Since 1996, Executive Intelligence Review has been the publication of record in exposing that the alleged terrorist "mastermind," Osama Bin Laden, is in fact a creation of U.S. and British intelligence services operating under the doctrine of Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his Trilateral Commission underling Samuel Huntington's theory of the "Clash of Civilizations."

In August, 1998, under the influence of high level agents of British and Israeli disinformation, the United States made the disastrous move to send cruise missile strikes against the the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, and against a number of locations in of a series of locations in Afghanistan, in "revenge" against Osama Bin Laden. The attacks had no effect in stopping alleged Bin Laden terrorism, and the Khartoum attack tragically killed an innocent civilian. Reports later revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies knew that the medicine factory in Khartoum was not a Bin Laden weapons plant, but that leading State Dept. figures around Madelaine Albright ignored reports that the Al Shifa plant had no connection to terrorism.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 strategic covert operation against the United States, where more than 6,000 people were killed, the same Osama Bin Laden false trail is being hyped by the U.S. media. Media repitition of the same disinformation and drivel that followed the 1998 Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania constitutes a threat to the national security. Again, EIR is warning that the "Bin Laden did it" propaganda line is a dangerous ruse that blindsides a real investigation into who was responsible for Sept. 11. At least a dozen major articles have appeared in EIR since 1996 detailing Bin Laden and his network as assets of British geopolitical destabilization. The excerpt here are taken from an article by Joseph Brewda which appeared in New Federalist newspaper on August 25, 1998.

With the U.S. bombing of the Afghan headquarters of Osama Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the American public has suddenly been hit with wildly exaggerated newspaper articles and television reports depicting Bin Laden as some new "Carlos the Jackal," a semi-mythical figure at the center of "international terrorism."

Only in the fantasy-ridden world of Hollywood do "rich" "criminal masterminds" carry on their own wars and terrorism. Outside the world of James Bond, things work quite differently. Within the U.S., this news service has been unique in its coverage of Bin Laden since July 1996, long before he was on anyone's "radar screen." EIRNS correctly identified him as a deployable and easily manipulable asset of British Intelligence services. He does not determine London's terrorist policy or its targets, and has a secondary assigned role bearing on financing, propaganda, and diversion, in the network in which he is deployed.

Bin Laden sometimes attempts to disguise his British affiliation, or the fact that the international headquarters of his movement is in London, and not, as absurdly claimed by the U.S. media, in Afghanistan or Sudan. Yet the truth can be seen by anyone who cares to seek it: Bin Laden called up the editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al Quds Al Arabi last week, to reassure the British that he was "only interested in hitting the U.S. and Israel" in response to the attack on Afghanistan, and not Britain. On Aug. 22, his London-based mouthpiece, Omar Bakri, also emphasized to the London-based Arabic daily Al Sharq Al Awsat, that "we have a covenant of peace with the British government."

The embassy bombings, as the U.S. government also knows but refuses to say, were not the work of Bin Laden. They were carried out on effective orders from London, and possibly with Israeli mediation, and may have included assets other than those identified with Bin Laden and his networks. In fact, some intelligence specialists have speculated that Bin Laden's role was more as part of an effort to entrap the Clinton administration into launching its ineffective and counterproductive attacks last weekwhich attacks will have long-term disastrous effects for U.S. policy, and which therefore serve London's larger interests in this period of global financial chaos and crisis. - Who Is Bin Laden, Anyway? -

To really understand Bin Laden requires stepping back from U.S. State Department and Defense Department press briefings, and Washington Post fulminations, to examine how and why Britain invented him, and how he is being deployed today.

As we have reported, and as is known to various international intelligence operatives, Osama Bin Laden first got involved in the terrorist and intelligence "business" in 1980, when he was picked up by the Thatcher and Reagan/Bush adminstration to help fund their "secret war" in Afghanistan. Since 1982, especially, Osama was often seen at the Afghan Mujahideen training camps in Peshawar, Pakistan, handing out sackfuls of cash to the "57 varieties" of Mujahideen groups then fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

This Afghan "secret war" was designed by Britain's Viscount Cranbourne, scion of the Cecil family, and his sidekick, Lord Bethell, as part of their general "Arc of Crisis" policy of using "Islamic fervor" to undermine the Soviet Union (while also, eventually, eliminating U.S. presence from the region). It was passed off to a duped Ronald Reagan by then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher .... Bin Laden, whose Saudi family became fabulously wealthy through government construction contracts, was one of a number of so-called private, dissavowable channels used to fund the war.

Osama Bin Laden first came to the attention of his future masters through their earlier deployment of his cousin and mentor, Sheikh Salim Bin Laden, one of four Saudis allowed entry into Britain's Prince Philip's exclusive 1001 Club, the financial conduit of his World Wildlife Fund. The Bin Laden family is the wealthiest non-royal family in the Saudi kingdom; Sheikh Salim was considered excessively Anglophilic, even by Saudi standards.

Sheikh Salim also found U.S. patrons. By 1979, he had become a business partner of George Bush's son, current Texas Governor George W. Bush, in the family's Zapata Oil and Arbusto Ltd.

Organizing Terrorism

By the time the Afghan war broke out in 1980, Sheik Salim was already a dominant figure in the British-run Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) which Thatcher and Bush used to fund their Afghan war. Osama, then a 20-year-old kid, was enlisted as the Sheikh's junior partner. His zeal for the "Afghan cause," and his $400 million in personal assets, came in handy.

In 1988, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, and the Bush and Thatcher governments dropped the Afghan Mujahideen from their roster of "Freedom Fighters," and dumped them on the job market. They remained under British Intelligence control, however. Many were soon redeployed to North Africa and the Mideast, to carry out terrorist actions ascribed to "Islamic terrorist groups," on behalf of British geopolitical aims. Bin Laden remained Britain's primary paymaster for these groups, and nothing more.